3 ms·

Do you mean the file extension should only reflect the file format and not the codecs it has inside ? Maybe that’s what we did in the past and it was a bad ide

Do you mean the file extension should only reflect the file format and not the codecs it has inside ? Maybe that’s what we did in the past and it was a bad idea. It’d be useful to know if you can read the file by looking only at its extension

galad87 1y ago
That wouldn't scale well, something like .av1opusflacwebvtt?
- ttoinou 1y ago
  Video codec is the most important though !
  - axiolite 1y ago
    Are you deaf? I can't see how anyone else would be happy downloading a file they can watch fine but can't hear.
    - ziml77 1y ago
      Not to mention that the codec barely tells you anything useful on its own. There are many parameters that affect the quality and file size. And heck it's not even guaranteed that you will be able to watch a video just given its codec. Like an old computer might be able to decode H.264 but only be able to do it in real-time at 480p due to processing requirements for going higher than that.
      - ttoinou 1y ago
        The goal is not to make something perfect its to make something better. AV1 / AV2 extension is better than MOV / MKV extension
    - ttoinou 1y ago
      Audio patents are expiring and there shouldn’t be any difficulty decoding real time most audio codecs. If you can decode the video real time there’s a very good chance you can decode the audio real time too.
      - axiolite 1y ago
        Though things are pretty boring and stable right now, there have been many times when audio codecs were changing rapidly and many people didn't have (and often couldn't get or use) an audio codec that was being commonly used in video files distributed online.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lxgr 1y ago
> Do you mean the file extension should only reflect the file format and not the codecs it has inside ? That's pretty much always been the case. File extensions are just not expressive enough to capture all the nuances of audio and video codecs. MIME types are a bit better. Audio is a bit of an exception with the popularity of MP3 (which is both a codec and a relatively minimal container format for it).
- o11c 1y ago
  If only people would actually bother to write the codecs in the MIME type in the first place ...
  - lxgr 1y ago
    Easier said than done, when there's no commonly accepted standard to store a file's MIME type as metadata, and you don't want to load all of ffmpeg into every webserver or file browser just so it can expose the proper granular one.
    - o11c 1y ago
      I mean, there is the xattr `user.mime_type`.
amiga386 1y ago
File extension shouldn't matter at all, because data should have associated metadata (e.g. HTTP content-type, CSS image-set, HTML <video><source type=""/></video>) > It’d be useful to know if you can read the file by looking only at its extension That would be madness, and there's already a workaround - the filename itself. For most people, all that matters is an MKV file is a video file, and your configured player for this format is VLC. Only in a small number of cases does it matter about an "inner" format, or choice of parameter - e.g. for videos, what video codec or audio codec is in use, what the bitrate is, what the frame dimensions are. For where it _matters_, people write "inner" file formats in the filename, e.g. "Gone With The Wind (1939) 1080p BluRay x265 HEVC FLAC GOONiES.mkv", to let prospective downloaders choose what to download from many competing encodings of exactly the same media, on websites where a filename is the _only_ place to write that metadata (if it were a website not standardised around making files available and searching only by filenames, it could just write it in the link description and filename wouldn't matter at all) Most people don't care, for example, that their Word document is A4 landscape, so much that they need to know _in the filename_.

galad87 1y ago

That wouldn't scale well, something like .av1opusflacwebvtt?

ttoinou 1y ago
Video codec is the most important though !
- axiolite 1y ago
  Are you deaf? I can't see how anyone else would be happy downloading a file they can watch fine but can't hear.
  - ziml77 1y ago
    Not to mention that the codec barely tells you anything useful on its own. There are many parameters that affect the quality and file size. And heck it's not even guaranteed that you will be able to watch a video just given its codec. Like an old computer might be able to decode H.264 but only be able to do it in real-time at 480p due to processing requirements for going higher than that.
    - ttoinou 1y ago
      The goal is not to make something perfect its to make something better. AV1 / AV2 extension is better than MOV / MKV extension
  - ttoinou 1y ago
    Audio patents are expiring and there shouldn’t be any difficulty decoding real time most audio codecs. If you can decode the video real time there’s a very good chance you can decode the audio real time too.
    - axiolite 1y ago
      Though things are pretty boring and stable right now, there have been many times when audio codecs were changing rapidly and many people didn't have (and often couldn't get or use) an audio codec that was being commonly used in video files distributed online.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

lxgr 1y ago

> Do you mean the file extension should only reflect the file format and not the codecs it has inside ? That's pretty much always been the case. File extensions are just not expressive enough to capture all the nuances of audio and video codecs. MIME types are a bit better. Audio is a bit of an exception with the popularity of MP3 (which is both a codec and a relatively minimal container format for it).

o11c 1y ago
If only people would actually bother to write the codecs in the MIME type in the first place ...
- lxgr 1y ago
  Easier said than done, when there's no commonly accepted standard to store a file's MIME type as metadata, and you don't want to load all of ffmpeg into every webserver or file browser just so it can expose the proper granular one.
  - o11c 1y ago
    I mean, there is the xattr `user.mime_type`.

amiga386 1y ago

File extension shouldn't matter at all, because data should have associated metadata (e.g. HTTP content-type, CSS image-set, HTML <video><source type=""/></video>) > It’d be useful to know if you can read the file by looking only at its extension That would be madness, and there's already a workaround - the filename itself. For most people, all that matters is an MKV file is a video file, and your configured player for this format is VLC. Only in a small number of cases does it matter about an "inner" format, or choice of parameter - e.g. for videos, what video codec or audio codec is in use, what the bitrate is, what the frame dimensions are. For where it _matters_, people write "inner" file formats in the filename, e.g. "Gone With The Wind (1939) 1080p BluRay x265 HEVC FLAC GOONiES.mkv", to let prospective downloaders choose what to download from many competing encodings of exactly the same media, on websites where a filename is the _only_ place to write that metadata (if it were a website not standardised around making files available and searching only by filenames, it could just write it in the link description and filename wouldn't matter at all) Most people don't care, for example, that their Word document is A4 landscape, so much that they need to know _in the filename_.